Over a series of interviews with Steve Coogan for my profile of him in V.F.’s March issue, I kept nudging the British comic about his pending lawsuit against News International, the U.K. publishing division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Coogan had been a target of News International’s more prurient papers, including the now-shuttered News of the World, almost from the moment he became famous in the early 1990s.

When we first met, in February of last year, the phone-hacking scandal still appeared to be small in scope. Andy Coulson, the communications director for British prime minister David Cameron, had just resigned his post on account of his having been the News of the World’s editor in the mid-aughts, the years when Coogan’s and other celebrities’ phones had been determined to have been hacked. “Oh, what a pity,” said Coogan with malevolent glee when I brought up Coulson’s forced departure.

As the scandal widened over 2011, claiming the luxuriant ginger scalp of News International chief Rebekah Brooks and subjecting Murdoch himself to a pie attack, Coogan remained steadfast in his insistence that, rather than settle with Murdoch and Co., he would take them to trial. “I’m in the mood for a fight,” he said. “Ironically, because I was so thoroughly turned over by these papers, I have no skeletons in my closet. I have been picked clean. They have made me invulnerable.”

But last week, after the V.F. article had gone to press, Coogan did indeed settle, accepting £40,000 in damages, payment of his legal costs, and a promise by News International never again to unlawfully obtain and publish private information about him. Coogan says he has chosen to settle because his mantle has been taken up by the government, and specifically by the Leveson Inquiry, the ongoing public investigation of the ethics and practices of the British press.

“This has never been about money,” Coogan said in a statement. “Like other people who have sued, I was determined to do my part to show the depths to which the press can sink in pursuit of private information. The police and the Leveson Inquiry will be investigating these matters, but at the time when these civil cases began, News International seemed likely to succeed in covering up the hacking scandal completely. Neither the police nor the government were willing to hold those responsible accountable for unlawful acts.”

Now, however, “the winds have changed,” Coogan told me not long ago, “and suddenly I’m on the right side.” And he is free to return to the business of being funny, making his first feature film centered around his most famous creation, Alan Partridge, more webisodes of Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge, and another season, with his pal Rob Brydon, of The Trip.